About CSAIL

UROP Research Opportunities

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) cultivates and supports research partnerships between MIT undergraduates and faculty. If you have any questions please contact kyleb@mit.edu or take a look at the How to UROP at CSAIL document (pdf format).

We are looking for 2-3 UROPs for the fall, hopefully extending to a longer research partnership. We are a part of the ALFA group in CSAIL. We are doing data mining, analytics on large amounts of data emanating from massive open online courses, MOOCs (edX primarily and possibly coursera). We have spent about a year organizing and getting data. We are starting a few projects to build analytics framework to easily query and visualize this data. We...

The MIT MERS Lab is currently working on designing algorithms and architectures for information gathering missions using multiple vehicles under time and safety constraints. We are seeking 1-2 UROP students for paid positions during the summer of 2013 to develop demonstrations of these technologies in both simulation and real hardware with air, and potentially ground, vehicles. Contact Pedro Santana psantana@mit.edu for more information.

Our group is building a novel, multi-material 3D printer with a modular hardware architecture and an extensive software stack that will allow both expert and novice users to fully exploit its printing potential. We seek a student to help implement a "print preview" feature that would allow for a rapid simulation of the print results before launching a 3D print. Print preview can dramatically improve the productivity of 3D printing since a typical 3D print takes hours or even days and uses high quantities of expensive materials. The perfect candidate would have taken 6.837 (...

Three-dimensional TV that does not require glasses is expected to be the next revolution in the history of television. Our group is building novel systems that allow for real-time acquisition, transmission, and 3D display of dynamic scenes. We seek a student to help us with development of algorithms and software for scalable processing of 3D video. The perfect candidate would have taken 6.837 (Computer Graphics) or 6.815/6.865 (Digital & Computational Photography). Contact: Please, send questions or application with CV to Wojciech Matusik (...

Our group is building a novel, multi-material 3D printer with a modular
hardware architecture and an extensive software stack that will allow both
expert and novice users to fully exploit its printing potential. We seek a
student to help us refine and further develop our software stack by creating
user cases that will push the limits of what our 3D printer can do. You will
use a modeling package to 3D model or improve an existing model, design and
implement the material composition of the object and 3D print the results on
a suite of 3D printers...

Our group is building a novel, multi-material 3D printer with a modular
hardware architecture and an extensive software stack that will allow both
expert and novice users to fully exploit its printing potential. We seek a
student to help us dramatically improve the scalability and performance of
our software stack by optimizing the scheduling of our 3D printer,
parallelizing components of our architecture and modifying our internal
compiler to generate SIMD/vector code. The ideal candidate would have taken
6.035 (Computer Language Engineering) or/...

Additive manufacturing and 3D printing exhibit great potential for
dramatically reducing cost and turn around time for fabricating highly
personalized objects. It also allows fabrication of materials with
non-traditional internal structures that are difficult or impossible to
manufacture with traditional manufacturing techniques. However, current
commercial 3D printers ship with inadequate software that does not allow for
the user to fully exploit their capabilities. Our group is building an
extensive software suite for designing materials with...

he recent increase in quantity and complexity of high-throughput sequencing has made high-performance distributed computing important. This UROP would involve helping to design and implement a flexible high-performance computing infrastructure that can utilize both high-memory local compute clusters along with massively parallel cloud computing instances. Existing framework in our lab consists of a preliminary hybrid cluster architecture that opportunistically utilizes amazon ec2 nodes, as well as analysis tools which have been created to utilize primarily ec2 nodes. Our goal is to...

So-called master regulators are transcription factor proteins whose individual expression can effect a change in cell identity by either directly co-binding with other factors to target specific gene regulation sites, or through the activation of broad signaling pathways. However, what precipitates the transition from one master-regulated state to another is typically not as well understood. For example, during the developmental transition from hematopoietic stem cells to red blood cells the Gata2 master regulator gives way to Gata1, binding different genomic sites despite their...

2 Developing and measuring algorithms for improved genomic studies. This project will use recently collected data that can improve on the standard and monolithic reference genomes that are currently employed. This project will seek to advance beyond that limitation and measure possible improvements on a wide variety of important experimental techniques.

Faculty Advisor: David Karger
Mentor(s): Ted Benson
Contact e-mail: karger@mit.edu
Research Area(s): Graphics and Human-Computer Interfaces
Think web frameworks like Node and Backbone are cool? Then help us develop the future of web templates. We are working on a web template language ( http://www.treesheets.org/ ) that continues to have benefits long after the page is rendered, including: rich copy-and-paste of...

Faculty Advisor: David Karger
Contact e-mail: karger@mit.edu
Research Area(s): Graphics and Human-Computer Interfaces
Our lives are filled with small, random scraps of information that seem to have no natural home. Where do we put them, and how do we find them later? We've created List.it (Link ), a fast, lightweight browser extension for capturing and organizing such scraps. Listit has over 25,000 active users who have recorded...

Faculty Advisor: David Karger
Contact e-mail: karger@mit.edu
Research Area(s): Graphics and Human-Computer Interfaces
Exhibit (Link ) is an open source Javascript library that helps non-programmers author and publish rich interactive data visualizations on the web. We use Exhibit to push the boundaries of web authoring without programming, with our ultimate goal being to enable end-users to WYSIWYG-author complete web applications. Exhibit has been adopted on over a thousand web sites by hobbyists, scientists, merchants, and journalists...

Faculty Advisor: David Karger
Contact e-mail: karger@mit.edu
Research Area(s): Graphics and Human-Computer Interfaces
There's a new movement in journalism to incorporate rich data visualization in news stories, but many journalists lack that skills to create their own "news apps" for this purpose. We've prototyped a data visualization framework, Datapress (Link ) to support authoring (not programming) such...

Faculty Advisor: David Karger
Contact e-mail: karger@mit.edu
Research Area(s): Graphics and Human-Computer Interfaces
Now that we can put textbooks on the web, how can we change them to make them better? How can we make them more dynamic, more adaptable to individual students, more sociable, or more informative? We've tackled some of these questions with Nb (Link ), tool that lets students hold forum-type discussions in the margins of their...

Faculty Advisor: David Karger
Contact e-mail: karger@mit.edu
Research Area(s): Graphics and Human-Computer Interfaces
Nowadays, all sorts of shady companies are collecting information about your browsing activities and using it for their own mysterious purposes. How could that information be used to your benefit? We propose to build Eyebrowse, a web browser extension that gathers information about your web browsing activities and shares that information (under your control) with...

Cells choose their identity as a result of combinatorial expression of proteins called transcription factors that bind to specific DNA sequences and turn on and off sets of genes. Our understanding of this cellular programming is rudimentary, but a more complete characterization could enable the conversion of one cell type into another with transformative therapeutic consequences. We have devised a machine learning technique that identifies the genomic binding location of a large number of transcription factors in a given cell state based on an experimental dataset called DNase-Seq, and we...

So-called master regulators are transcription factor proteins whose individual expression can effect a change in cell identity by either directly co-binding with other factors to target specific gene regulation sites, or through the activation of broad signaling pathways. However, what precipitates the transition from one master-regulated state to another is typically not as well understood. For example, during the developmental transition from hematopoietic stem cells to red blood cells the Gata2 master regulator gives way to Gata1, binding different genomic sites despite their...

The Infolab seeks UROPs interested in investigating natural language tools for artificial intelligence. The Infolab works on question answering, parsing, generating, and more, using both symbolic and statistical techniques. Introductory projects range from integrating knowledge sources to expanding automated methods to creating user interfaces and APIs; continuing opportunities for more in-depth research are available.